Page 46 of John Wilder Gets Schooled
My heart clenched, even though I’d heard similar stories plenty of times—parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that their kids might fall short of whatever usually arbitrary and bullshit mark they’d set for them. And while it didn’t surprise me that Wilder had taken the fall to make sure Cassidy was taken care of, I wished he hadn’t had to make that choice.
“So you moved in next door?” I said quietly.
Wilder’s expression softened. “Yeah. Turned up on Danny’s doorstep, took one look at his grandma, and bawled like a fucking baby. She didn’t need to ask what had happened. She hugged me until I got my shit together and told me I lived with them now. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”
“You and Cassidy obviously still like each other,” I said. “No chance you’ll get back together?”
I was more invested in the answer than I cared to admit.
Wilder gave a soft laugh. “No. We’re better as friends. Cassidy’s great, but we don’t feel that way about each other. I doubt we would have lasted more than a summer.” He looked conflicted. “Like, Iloveher, you know? But that’s because she’s Gracie’s mom and, apart from the idiots I live with, the closest friend I’ve got. I always tell people that Danny and Chase and Cash are my brothers, but I can’t call Cassidy my sister because then it gets weird.”
“I can see that.” I snorted, even though his answer settled something in my gut. Something I was trying to pretend wasn’t there.He’s not hung up on his ex, hooray!As though that cleared some path to Wilder and me, together,official, even though he’d given no indication there was a vacancy, and I sure as hell wasn’t applying for the position.
Was I?
No. Because he was a parent and I was his kid’s teacher andboundaries, Avery.
The voice in my head sounded a lot like Dallas’s, I’d listened to him so much.
Besides, Wilder had specifically said he didn’t have time for a relationship, so it wasfine.
Wilder ate the last piece of his steak, then leaned back in his chair with a happy sigh and rubbed his washboard abs. “Man, that was good.”
“Well, you cooked it, so kudos to you.”
“The salad was good too!” he said, and he sounded so apologetic that I laughed.
“Nah, the steak was the best part, and you cooked it better than I would have,” I said. I leaned forward and confessed my greatest sin. “I usually use the air fryer.”
“Aw, Avery,” he said and winced.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!”
“I will never try it,” he said. “It’s calledstandards.” But he was grinning as he said it. He raised his eyebrows. “Guess I’ll just have to come and cook all your steaks for you.”
“I guess you will!” I said, because boundaries were a thing past me had been thinking about thirty seconds ago, which was a whole lifetime, and I was apparently a new and different person now. But it made us both laugh, so I didn’t regret it, and I’d have plenty of time later to either untangle all my conflicted feelings or just shove them into another part of my brain and try to ignore them completely.
I’d probably do the second thing.
Then, like a gentleman, Wilder took our plates to the kitchen and cleaned up.
That knotted tangle of feelings was going to be pretty hard to ignore.
I didn’t knowwhen Goose Run started to feel like home instead of an extended trip that I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying or not. Maybe it was when Mrs. Freeman said she’d gotten excellent feedback from some of my kids’ parents or when Alan invited me to pickleball—side note: what evenwaspickleball? I said yes, so at some point I was going to find out. Or it might have been when Dana discovered I liked to crochet and we started trading patterns and yarn. Or it could have been the afternoon I came home to find that someone had decorated my mailbox with googly eyes, with Gracie sitting on her porch step grinning at me and giggling. But I thought it was probably when the guys next door began to wave at me when I was leaving for work or coming home, and our spaghetti nights and cookouts became less invitations and more, “Hey, can you bring some chips and salsa?” I wasn’t a guest anymore, I was just one of the guys, and it fit like an old comfortable T-shirt.
But maybe itreallystarted to feel like home whenever Wildersmiled at me through the noise and chaos of hanging out with the guys—noise excluded in Cash’s case, obviously, but he still brought the chaos—and that smile asked the silent question ofcan you believe these idiots?Not a private joke, exactly, but a private moment, and I liked them more than was smart.
Wilder hadn’t come back over to my place alone, but I didn’t think it was because he didn’t want to. It was just life getting in the way.
“Daddy?” Gracie asked one spaghetti night at my place. “Mr. Smith gave me homework!”
“I’m a monster,” I said. “You can call me Avery when we’re not in school, Gracie.” Then I said to the rest of the table, “It’s barely even homework! It’s a worksheet about opposites. It hasfivequestions.”
“That’s one for every year of her life,” Chase said. “You really are a monster.”
Cash laughed silently.
“It’s also a coloring page!” I protested.
